ROBERT ROGERS, RANGER

A patient dismantling of a frontiersman's reputation.

If you remember the 1940 Spencer Tracy vehicle Northwest Passage, Robert Rogers was a steely but fair-minded commander who turned uncouth frontiersmen into well-disciplined fighters. The movie doesn’t mention the real Rogers’ penchant for taking scalps of both the Native and French peoples who inhabited the old Northwest, pocketing the bounty money while decrying scalping as a “barbarous custom” of the “savages.” He was, attorney and history buff Klotz writes, “a chronic alcoholic whose drinking sapped his judgment,” an abusive husband and absent father, and a toady who kowtowed before his royal superiors, seeking favors. He spent more time in the courtroom than on the battlefield, it seems, from being hauled before the bench to be tried for counterfeiting and court-martialed for war profiteering. He was constantly in debt for “gambling, poor business decisions, and extravagant personal spending.” Having settled on the Loyalist cause before the Revolution, and “willing to sell his services to the highest bidder,” he fled to England during the Revolutionary War, spending his remaining days alternating between pubs and debtors’ prisons. Halfhearted efforts to find the Northwest Passage led to naught, although Klotz does allow that militarily Rogers had a few fine moments, seizing French forts in present-day Michigan and Indiana and escaping an assault by a larger Continental force, an attack motivated by the fact that George Washington “considered the destruction of the Queen’s Rangers an important objective.” Rogers is a largely obscure figure in the annals of the late colonial and revolutionary era, then, for good reason, including his personal shortcomings and “deficiencies as a commander”—hardly the stuff of a movie hero.

Capable revisionist history that highlights an already despised figure, only to diminish him further.